Journalists’ Roundtable: Death row inmate executed

Good evening and welcome to Arizona Horizon. I’m Ted Simons. It’s Friday, and that means it’s time for another edition of the Journalists Roundtable. Joining us tonight are Mary Jo Pitzl with The Arizona Republic, Stacey Barchenger with The Arizona Republic and Steve Goldstein with KJZZ.

This week’s Journalists’ Roundtable covered:

• Death-Row inmate executed
• AZ busing migrants to D.C.
• GOP attorney general debate
• Biggs subpoenaed by Jan. 6th Committee
• Biggs, Gosar, Finchem stay on ballot
• Cyber Ninjas release some records

This week, an inmate on Death Row was executed, the first in eight years. Could we see more executions in the near future? 

Mary Jo Pitzl: “I would think so. The main reason this has all been held up was because of inability to get the proper kind of drugs to do a lethal injection execution. This execution seemed to have cleared that hurdle, so I think that roadblock is out of the way.”

Steve Goldstein: “It’s interesting to see, there’s a few more months in office for Attorney General Mark Brnovich, and I don’t know if this helps him in a Republican Senate primary, but he’s been real aggressive of late, really pushing that since January.”

Arizona is now busing migrants to Washington, D.C. How does this compare to similar actions taken by Texas? 

Stacey Barchenger: “This week, the governor put out a press release about an issue that he asked social media companies to crack down on advertising recruiting citizens to drive migrants across and from the border. So, we get this lengthy press release about this, and there’s a paragraph towards the bottom that says ‘oh, we’re going to start helping people get to Washington, D.C. And so I called the governor’s office, and it turns out that, by that time, the first bus had already arrived in Washington. Arizona is following in Texas’ footsteps.”

Mary Jo Pitzl: Doug Ducey isn’t Greg Abbott but, you know, this is a far cry from a lot of the photo-ops that Ducey has done down at the border. Remember his first term, the ‘We got him?’ that sort of fiasco about a shooter that they’d caught or thought they had caught, a man that had been terrorizing people and shooting them on the freeways. I’m surprised that this was so subtle.”